This is the raw numeric reference — a hex code for every commonly-cited SRM stop, generated the same way the SRM colour calculator renders its own result swatch, for holding your own beer up against on a screen. If you want the descriptive names (straw, gold, amber, brown, black) matched to real style examples instead of a bare number, see the SRM to beer colour name chart — this page is the underlying numeric ladder that chart's bands are drawn from.
The stops
| SRM | Hex |
|---|---|
| 2 | #FFD878 |
| 4 | #FFBF42 |
| 6 | #FFA032 |
| 8 | #E58A1F |
| 10 | #C97514 |
| 13 | #A85C10 |
| 17 | #8D4C0A |
| 20 | #6B3612 |
| 24 | #552A10 |
| 29 | #3D1E0E |
| 35 | #25140B |
| 40 | #140B06 |
These aren't evenly spaced by design — the gaps between adjacent stops widen at the dark end of the scale, because human colour perception is far less sensitive to small SRM differences once a beer is already dark brown to black; a 2-point difference matters a lot visually between SRM 3 and SRM 5, and barely at all between SRM 33 and SRM 35. The calculator interpolates smoothly between these anchor stops for any exact value your grain bill produces, so a computed 8.4 SRM (a real example: 4.1 kg pale malt at 2°L plus 0.5 kg 40°L crystal, 19 L batch — run it here) renders its own precise interpolated shade rather than snapping to the nearest listed stop.
The honest limits of a screen-based swatch
None of this is spectrophotometrically calibrated — these hex values are aggregated from widely published homebrew SRM colour charts, useful for orientation and comparison, not for competition-grade colour matching. Two different screens render the identical hex code differently depending on brightness, colour profile and ambient lighting, and a monitor's colour gamut can't reproduce beer's actual translucency and depth in a glass at all. If you need a genuinely reliable colour match — for competition entry or serious quality control — compare a real sample against a physical SRM reference kit (a set of graduated coloured discs viewed through a standard depth of beer) rather than a screen, and treat this chart as a fast sanity check rather than a substitute for one.
Using this alongside your own grain bill
Run your actual grain bill through the SRM calculator to get an exact number and its interpolated swatch, then find the nearest stops above and below it here to see roughly how much colour headroom you have before crossing into a visibly different band — useful when you're fine-tuning a recipe's specialty-grain percentage and want to know how far a small change would actually move the final colour, not just whether it moves it at all.